She Paints
in Open Air
The West is inspiration
for Joellyn Duesberry

By COLLEEN SMITH
Photography KIMBERLY DAWN

I?n Greenwood Village, an old red barn houses the studio of Joellyn Duesberry, a painter with an impressive pedigree. Inside the door, a brass hall tree holds two broad-brimmed straw hats and a pair of paint-splotched fingerless gloves and a fluorescent red safety vest — gear almost as important to the artist’s process as brushes and easels.

Duesberry is a plein-air holdout. Though she finishes her canvases in the even light of her studio’s multiple skylights, she begins her paintings outdoors, on location.

“It’s the method that’s my message,” says Duesberry. “It’s a dying art, plein-air painting.”

Long-legged and long-haired, at age 61 Duesberry remains tall enough, lithe enough and handsome enough that she might be mistaken for a former fashion model. But the kind of beauty with which the artist concerns herself is much deeper than skin. Duesberry is about nature’s structure and light, the beauty of brushstrokes that forsake the circumstantial in favor of introducing more expansive concepts. In Denver, William Havu Gallery represents Duesberry and will exhibit her monotypes from May 12 through July 1.

“Joly is able to convey the idea of detail without detail. You see color and form, and the mind fills in the rest. That’s the real trick to pull off as a painter, and she does it as well as anyone that I’ve seen painting — and I’ve seen a lot of others,” says Bill Havu.

Wearing the all-black uniform — albeit with striped socks — preferred by many artists, nonetheless Duesberry is as full of color as her canvases. Paintings of all sizes and ages and stages of development line her studio. Here is an interior painted 30 years ago, a print shop piled with cardboard boxes that somehow seem romantic. Here is a work-in-progress, a nude reclining on a garden bench. Her oeuvre includes such figures and interiors and still lifes, as well, but expressive landscapes are Duesberry’s calling card.

Here is a bridge over an iced river. Here is a luminous and textural Tuscan vista. She paints the Highline Canal, Red Rocks Park or the pastoral property she shares with her husband, Dr. Ira Kowal, a cardiologist; Sadie, an Irish wolfhound; and Banjo, a West Highland terrier.

“There’s a wonderful symmetry in the work,” Havu says. “It’s dimensional. You know the relationship of foreground, middle ground, background.”

Duesberry’s personal background includes a turnstile moment in her childhood when she was mesmerized by dusky light on a pair of red sneakers on white sand at a beach in her home state of Virginia. She began painting at age 5.

“I did shoes and then landscapes, then portraits — faces and figures. I drew every day in high school, college and graduate school, but not for a career,” she says. Her family did not encourage her to pursue the artist’s life; rather, they expected her to marry well enough to save the family farm. Duesberry had a distant relationship with her mother, and credits Mina, the daughter of a slave, for raising her.

“Your mama don’t like you, but she wear you like a hat,” Mina told Duesberry when she was about age 14.

“Because of Mina, I grew up believing I had wisdom,” says Duesberry, who also cherishes the influence of her late grandfather, who was half Cherokee. “Animals ate out of his hand,” she says of the man who instilled in her a reverence for the natural world. A Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, she rendered portraits of classmates to earn Christmas money. She dabbled in etching and woodcuts, but painting remained her passion.

Armed with her Master of Arts degree from New York University, Institute of Fine Art, she lived a duplicitous life working in New York as an art appraiser, but painting as well. She knew no women painter role models. In her salad days, fine art painting remained largely a male bastion. Duesberry, a self-proclaimed feminist, recalls receiving a postcard from New Mexico with a painting that, because of a typographical error, was credited to George — rather than Georgia — O’Keefe.

“I knew I wanted to go there,” she says. And she did.

Duesberry, for the most part, is self-taught — a fact that seems a source of both pride and shame. She studied periodically in New York at the National Academy of Design and the Arts Students League, but in New Mexico she turned an artistic corner. In 1996, Duesberry took a master’s class at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts. The teacher: Richard Diebenkorn.

Under the tutelage of the influential American painter, Duesberry surfaced her quirky artistic voice. She says, ”He’d point to a corner of a vignette I was working on and say, ‘This is your hand.’ I know now, because I’ve taught, that he was separating the betrayal of the typical urge to please he’d seen in hundreds of students. He’d look for a noisy or intimate gesture that could only be personal.”

Diebenkorn also steered Duesberry toward monotypes. She uses the printing medium to discover direction for finishing paintings. In a foreword to A Covenant of Seasons, published in 1998, John Walsh of the Getty describes Duesberry’s monotypes as “serene, summarizing landscapes” and dubs her “a keen-eyed interpreter.”

Along with Diebenkorn’s direction, the West had its way with Duesberry. “When I came here, the West was still exotic,” she says. “I had to understand scale.” Wide-open vistas informed her vision, and the crisper edges induced by an arid environment — as opposed to shared edges of the humid East — challenged her.

While most painters move from representational works to abstract, Duesberry has done the opposite, yet her early career’s abstract streak is still evident in her landscapes. An intelligence infuses the work. Some painters go only as deep as their canvas, but Duesberry fearlessly excavates her experience. Cases in point: large canvases that convey the desolation of Ground Zero and the grief of an elephant graveyard. Duesberry had spent six months in a studio perched high in the World Trade Center. The artist who followed her in the program that granted studio space perished in the terrorist attack.

“You can’t imagine how depressed I was,” says Duesberry, who visits New York monthly to socialize and take in the art in the city and to work in her upstate studio. Duesberry entertains no retirement plan: “I would be bored silly if I stopped,” she says. “I’ll do it as long as I’m physically able.” In fact, she’s dabbling in a new direction: collages of earlier monotypes.

“My graphic language is so peculiar, and I’m zooming in on little details, bursting boundaries, overlapping pieces at odd angles, cooking with microcosmic elements,” she says. Her works never satisfy what’s in her mind’s eye, she admits. “I go back to them years later and appreciate them for what they were instead of what the tendency became,” she says. “I don’t approach them as a goal. It’s only process.”

Her process, art and life were the subject of a documentary titled Joellyn Duesberry: Dialogue with the Artist, released at Denver Art Museum in 2002 and aired on PBS. Duesberry’s work is in several public collections, including the Red Rocks Amphitheater Visitor Center, City Hall of Littleton and Denver Art Museum.

“Joellyn Duesberry is a talented American painter,” says Lewis Sharp, director of the Denver Art Museum. “Her spontaneous style captures the light and forms of city and landscape in a very compelling way, and we at the Denver Art Museum are proud that Colorado has served as inspiration for many of her works.”

Duesberry’s illustrious career is all the more gripping given that she has struggled with life-threatening illness throughout her adult life, having faced four bouts with a disease she dares not discuss.

“The victim mentality is very dangerous,” she says. “Painting has kept me alive, I have no question. What happens to me in the land and the positive energy I invest in all this work has an effect on my health. I know the power of this work on my life is magical, and without it I am diminished, depressed.”

To maintain her health, she hits the elliptical trainer in her studio, practices yoga, skis, gardens. One year, when told she was going to die, she ran a marathon. A woman who has stared down death four times, she knows something about life. She has been on safari, trekked Peru, gone sailboarding. “I’ll do anything or go anywhere,” she says.

Her work is as adventurous as her life. She has tackled ambitious projects like a monotype triptych that took three 14-hour days to paint and print. “It was so important to me to try and give an idea of the experience I have in the open with the heat on my back and birdsong in my ear,” she says.

Another canvas, 24 feet long and 24 inches high, was painted over the course of 14 straight days using no brush smaller than three inches wide. She intends to take on even larger canvases. “I want to work bigger — bigger brushes, bigger movement of arm,” she says. “I want to be surrounded by what I’m doing so my eye doesn’t stop at the edge.”

Frequently, owing to advancing arthritis in her hands, she holds her brushes in her fist. She scrapes paint with a palette knife. She gets her fingertips involved. “I am more of a sculptor with colors,” she says of her style. Though she emphasizes that her work is not easy, painting does bring her joy. “It’s like humming a tune without words,” she says. “I know the notes to sound in color.”

And she knows when inspiration strikes, galvanizing her attention. “There’s the urgency of coming upon something that must be gobbled by eye and hand. It’s like being jerked into full attention, like I was saluting,” she says. “If I’m in a hurry and walk by, it will pull me back. I end up in the damnedest places, standing in mud so deep that I’m freezing, but it had to be there. I would be riveted to a spot, a square foot in which I found what I needed.”

Colleen Smith, a Denver writer, also contributes arts pieces to The Denver Post and Colorado Expression.